Earlier this year a story commissioned by
The reasons for giving up on a tracker may seem obvious to anyone who's ever used one. Taking care of one's health doesn't depends on access to money and the structural comforts it affords far more than data. If you're working two jobs with a three-bus commute, live in fear of debt collectors and haphazard rent increases, all while trying to raise a family of three and keep a spouse happy, then monitoring your heart rate, counting steps, or keeping a log of how much water you're drinking probably won't feel much like health or care.
A number of doctors aren't so sure about the benefits of wearables eithers. A recent MIT Technology Review story found doctors from a number of specialities unsure about what to do with the data many of their fitness-tracking patients are bringing them."Clinicians can’t do a lot with the number of steps you’ve taken in a day," Neil Sehgal, a senior research scientist at UCSF Center for Digital Health Innovation said. Andrew Trister, an oncologist and researcher at Sage Bionetworks echoed this sentiment. "[Patients] come in with these very large Excel spreadsheets, with all this information," he said. "I have no idea what to do with that."
One of the short-term problems for trackers is that they're not actually reliable enough to be medically useful. The sorts of measurements that devices cheap enough to be commercial products tend only to focus on vague metrics that could just as easily be inferred from a short interview or basic examination. While certain health trackers have shown promise—such as the small implants that manage insulin for diabetics—they can also produce a hyper-vigilance and paranoia, leading to a degenerative process of over-managing issues that a person's body is already handling.
This spring the AARP asked 11 physicians what one thing they would do to reform the current healthcare system in America and the top answer wasn't more data from patients, but instead a need for patients to have more information about their healthcare options. "When consumers choose healthcare, they have precious little information on the outcomes that are meaningful for them," wrote Peter Pronovost, director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
"How long will I be out of work? How well is my pain controlled? How likely am I to get an infection if I have this procedure done by this doctor? If consumers had as much information about healthcare as they do about consumer products, we would see dramatic improvements in quality — and reduced costs."
The fitness tracker industry pushes people in the opposite direction, encouraging them to collect a mass of non-specific data about themselves during times when they don't have any particular health concern, then expects their physician to do the work of a soothsayer, reading an exact diagnosis from a thicket of numbers about a person's weight or heart rate.
Instead of encouraging patients to look at their lives holistically and evaluate risks and potential benefits in personal context, fitness trackers teach patients to think of healthcare as a process of submission, straining toward objective standards that even physicians aren't sure are useful. The key to good health is having enough money to pay for it. Everything else is just data for someone else's bottomline.
